Bitlayer Builds the First Layer 2 BitVM Platform for Seamless Bitcoin Transactions on AWS

Singapore-based Bitlayer aims to position Bitcoin as the foundation of a fully decentralized economy. Founded in 2023 and valued at over $300 million, Bitlayer has secured major investments from U.S. financial firms. Kevin He and Charlie Hu co-founded Bitlayer in October 2023 after introducing the Bitcoin Virtual Machine (BitVM). BitVM enhances Bitcoin's computing power while preserving its core principles of security and decentralization. He and Hu recognized Bitcoin’s potential to play a role beyond payments—including digital assets, financial services, and online gaming.

Bitlayer set out to become the first Layer 2 solution on the Bitcoin blockchain to utilize BitVM for both on-chain and off-chain transactions. To achieve this, the company required a scalable and secure infrastructure to support its business model. “Our challenges were two-fold,” explains He. “We needed a cloud platform that offered the scalability and security Bitcoin demands, while also helping us manage costs since we’re still in the start-up phase.”

Drawing on its prior experience with AWS from earlier Bitcoin projects, Bitlayer chose to build the infrastructure for its BitVM offering onAWS. “We knew AWS was widely used in the Web3 blockchain community for its scalability and global reach,” explains He. “We were also aware of AWS’s efforts to ensure secure infrastructure, which is crucial for building trusted blockchain-based solutions.”

To carry the project through from development to going live, the Bitlayer team set up both its Testnet and Mainnet blockchains on AWS. Initially, the company relied on on-demand Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances for resource-heavy workloads, but it later transitioned to Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances (RI) for predictable computing needs. “Switching to Amazon EC2 RI helped us cut our compute costs by about 20 percent,” says He. “The AWS team recommended the change, highlighting their focus on cost optimization from the beginning.”

Given the Mainnet environment's need for rapid access to critical data and applications, Bitlayer deployed Amazon Elastic Block Store for persistent, secure, high-performance block storage. It also used Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for PostgreSQL for its database needs, utilizing AWS Multi–Availability Zone architecture to safeguard performance. “This setup means we can perform upgrades without slowing down or stopping servers, which is essential for maintaining high availability,” says He.